The Zingularityhttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity
Just another Freethought Blogs siteTue, 10 Mar 2015 20:19:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Clinton and eGhazihttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/03/10/clinton-and-eghazi/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/03/10/clinton-and-eghazi/#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 20:10:38 +0000http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/?p=12862I’ve been a network admin who dealt with email specifically, and I’ve worked a Wall Street job that was highly regulated. Both vantages inform me that there’s a good reason why people would want to control their emails: they don’t want other people being able to go through them.

TPM — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that while she took “unprecedented” steps to provide the State Department with emails related to her tenure as secretary of state, she did not save a trove of emails related to her personal life.

In a news conference following her speech to a women’s empowerment event at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Clinton explained that she chose to use her personal email account to conduct business as secretary of state out of convenience. That way, she said, she could use just one device for all of her communications.

The former secretary of state emphasized that she provided “all my emails that could possibly be work-related” to the State Department once she was asked for them. But she said that emails that were personal in nature were not handed over to the agency.

“I chose not to keep my private personal emails,” she said during the news conference. “Emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements. Condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations — the other things you typically find in inboxes.

We have a majority of the population itching for a disastrous ground war in Iraq against ISIS, we have crumbling infrastructure, we have growing income inequality and a ton of people, myself included, who have never recovered from the Great Recession and probably never will. And what will we be discussing for the next month?

Hillary Clinton’s private emails and the never-ending, never defined, Benghazi. Might as well be Whitewater and Monica and 1996 all over again. Only without the full employment and living wages …

Political orientation can certainly have an effect on whether or not Americans accept science. But a new study shows it’s another specific belief system that causes the most anti-science skepticism. Take a wild guess what it is …

WaPo — The ‘direct effect’ of liberal-conservative orientation is spurious once the distinct belief systems that underlie those identifications are accounted for,” wrote Gauchat.

Which belief systems? In particular, being a biblical literalist — endorsing the statement, “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word” — was a much bigger factor than liberalism or conservatism in explaining why some people disagreed with the use of science in “concrete government policy decisions,” and also why they were against federal science funding.

BTW, the same study supported prior findings that the more scientific info a skeptic is exposed to, the more skeptical they become of science. That’s a promising glitch for the future, huh?

I was just realizing what an impact the character Spock had on my young life and probably others. I was too young to enjoy the series when it aired, but syndication did the trick. Spock was the first person on TV I can recall who made being a science “nerd” cool and being markedly different admirable.
]]>http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/27/farewell-leonard-nimoy/feed/2Stay classy, ISIShttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/27/stay-classy-isis/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/27/stay-classy-isis/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 10:25:28 +0000http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/?p=12855

BTW the video played slowly and choppy for me, and MSNBC is by no means the only streaming site that has these problems. I have no idea why major media organizations can’t do better. But I’ll take a wild guess and assume it has to do with money.
]]>http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/27/stay-classy-isis/feed/2An anniversary and an iCarhttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/20/an-anniversary-and-an-icar/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/20/an-anniversary-and-an-icar/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 13:39:24 +0000http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/?p=12852

February 20, the day of my birth. That’s right, I made it another year! And while grats are great and a poor guy like me would never turn down a birthday shekel or two sent to my paypal lifeline using Darksydothemoon/at/aol-dot-com, what I’d really like someday is an nice, iCar! In that vein, as oil prices edge higher amid growing Middle East tension and US fossil fuel production grapples with price volatility and safety concerns, one entrepreneur has offered up a possible, intriguing new piece of what our future, collective energy solution might look like:

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, announced Wednesday that the company is working on a new kind of battery that would be used to power homes. Based on Tesla’s lithium-ion battery technology, the new battery is expected to help the company become a leader in the growing home energy-storage market.

At this moment, many solar or wind-powered homes have to remain on a the grid because there has not been a way to store extra power for lean hours. If given a relatively cheap and reliable battery to hold the power needed, building off-grid in the country will become commonplace …

Generation capacity in alternative energy including solar has grown dramatically over the last decade or two. But longer term storage of energy in general remains an issue for designers. Especially in places like this week’s wintery Northeast, where peak energy consumption often coincides with lower levels of alternative production and traditional distribution headaches.

New reports suggest that Apple is developing an electric and possibly driverless iCar to rival Google and Tesla. Apple are poaching Tesla employees with Elon Musk admitting Apple are offering a $250k signing bonus and a 60% pay increase. There have also been sightings in the US of Apple registered cars with some interesting tech attached to them.

Graeme Wood at The Atlantic has posted a powerful, comprehensive introduction to ISIS which reviews the nascent movement’s recent history, stated goals, and current status. It is highly recommended for anyone with even casual interest, and especially to those concerned we may we well be in the middle of a real war here shortly. The short cliff-note version is that ISIS is a real brand of fundamentalist Islam working to bring ancient values, from over a thousand years ago, in to all aspects of their modern culture culminating in a war of civilizations. The final battle — or one of the final battles — will occur near a Syrian town near the Turkish border, where Jesus Christ himself will ride to the rescue of the good Islamic guys and join the fight against the evil might of vast Roman armies:

What ISIS really wants — There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.

Note that those videos we keep seeing are not like when we were kids, they’re not something inadvertently caught in frame by a terrified photo-journalist in a foreign war zone. They are slickly produced Youtube features ready to slot into social media, purely intended to produce a known effect: piss off the west and thus goad us into action, and recruit Jihads in the Middle East to meet us in battle. The strategy may be working. A new poll now finds a small uptick in US support for a ground war and larger, growing frustration with events in the region.

]]>http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/17/us-support-for-ground-war-ticks-up/feed/7ISIS wants us in a warhttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/16/isis-wants-us-in-a-war/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/16/isis-wants-us-in-a-war/#commentsMon, 16 Feb 2015 12:50:40 +0000http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/?p=12837When you live long enough you see the same thing over and over again, sometimes in a slightly different package, too often in the same old wrapper. This is true for human interest stories and it’s the same with the Greatest Threat on Earthtm. Even in the pre 9-11 era, the latter kinds of threat seemed to somehow pop up every few years, although the fallout from Vietnam and a Cold War with a credible adversary kept us cautious for a couple of decades. But after Sept 11, 2001, that caution was long gone. Even the hard-earned second thoughts from the ill-conceived Iraq War has worn off remarkably fast. And these ISIS clowns want us and anyone else they can get in this war real bad:

Daily Kos — As I wrote last June, we cannot win an already lost war. And however good and noble his intentions may have been, President Obama inherited lost wars, and there was nothing he could have done to save them. But no matter how many American troops he sends to these already lost wars, no matter how much money he sends, and no matter how many timetables are established only to prove not to have been time limits at all, President Obama and his team still don’t seem to have figured out that however good and noble their intentions, they inherited lost wars, and there was nothing they could have done, and there is nothing they can do, to save them. Which brings us back to the new request for a new authorization to use military force.

If ISIS wasn’t making execution videos featuring westerners and Christians, and encouraging attacks all over the world, I don’t think we’d care about them much more than we care about Assad in Syria or crazy religious fanatics in Africa. The only reason they’re doing that is because they’re getting something out of it. Clearly they’re recruiting to beat the band. I’m not sure what else they expect but they’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Remember that bin Laden’s original plan was to draw the US into a land war in Afghanistan and bring us down financially the way the USSR fell. Some of that may have transferred over to ISIS. Regardless, sooner or later they get radar and SAMs, shoot down a US plane or two, torture/kill US pilots live on Youtube, and from then on it’s hard to see how we stay out. The domestic political pressure to escalate would be enormous.

Think of the 1980 Iranian Hostage Crisis on steroids played out on 24/7 social media with live updates from the bad guys. Not just endless war, the true horror of war endlessly in our faces. If you were not following the run up to Iraq in 2002, you may not fully appreciate how fast national sentiment can turn on a dime and go overboard. Defense hawks come flying out from all corners, media turns dark, flag pins appear and flags go up everywhere. It’s scary and heady and even a little bit exciting, at first, and in some sick way. But the point is, things can change very fast, and this has all the marks of one of those kind of changes on the horizon.

The fact is, these particular bad guys are terrible, murderous, medieval players. But they’re not unique, sad to say, not even close. It has been SOP for millennia for armed thugs to go into villages, kill and plunder everyone and everything in sight, kick some loot back up the chain of command in tribute, keep the rest and maybe save a few girls between ages 10 and 15 for wives/sex slaves. It’s been happening since the days of Caesar and before, it’s happening now in Central Iraq and Syria, it’s happened elsewhere throughout the world over the last few decades. We decided years ago that we can’t always do much about this, and if we try, it’s real easy to screw up.

Nation building, policing entire regions containing millions of people, it’s just not something to wade into lightly and certainly not without serious, comprehensive support from other nations the world over. And if we go that route, this could turn into a real big war with real serious weapons. With massive casualties, up to the modern version of salting the Earth and burning the Syrian/Iraqi fields. Does the west really have that kind of stamina left for near total destruction? Would we be wise enough to hold back as necessary, or might we be tempted to go too far? Should we even contemplate doing it?

Our allies in such a struggle might ultimately include Syrian Assad forces, Tehran, and a few former Iraqi Ba’athist warlords. Not a great choice.

Because what often happened in the past, after the worst of the massacres and work camps were over and the sex slaves sold off and horribly abused and/or married, was some of the bad guys who profited the most during the height of the carnage start looking around and realize they’ve now got it pretty damn good. At which point they decide to simmer down and move toward more law and order, mostly to protect their own loot, but there are side benefits for the masses sometimes and big benefits for former enemies in many cases.

Why do politicians venture to London like it was an epic journey to the North Pole, where glorious foreign policy cred awaits ye who plants his banner in the middle of Downing Street? Because that hasn’t gone well in the last few years, especially for the GOP, and it has already started off on a small snag even for the careful, bland likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

In his last response, Walker ducked a question and follow-up from his interviewer about whether he believed in evolution, saying politicians were better off steering clear of that issue. “I’m going to punt on that one as well,” Walker said. “I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about other things.”

The event’s moderator, Justin Webb of BBC Radio 4, responded by saying he believed any British politician would answer by readily accepting evolution. As an elected official in Wisconsin, Walker has rarely addressed the topic. The governor later Wednesday issued a statement through his campaign that again avoided stating where he stands on the issue.

“Both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God,” Walker’s statement said. “I believe faith and science are compatible, and go hand in hand.”

I would take that last part as a tacit admission that, if somehow pushed, Walker would say he accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and at least some major aspects of evolution. Hey, a science blogger can hope!

The universe it seems is not without a sense of humor. At least that’s one conclusion a person might draw from this very real image of a distant galaxy cluster bent by the gravity of a nearer cluster into a cosmic smiley face:

Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures in the Universe and exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the spacetime around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them. This phenomenon, crucial to many of Hubble’s discoveries, can be explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring — known as an Einstein Ring — is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here.

It’s too bad we didn’t have the Hubble or something like it a hundred years ago. It would have saved a number of people chasing total eclipses all over the world, with bulky telescopes and other gear in hand, to confirm or reject one of the more spectacular predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, first published exactly 100 years ago: the eerie bending of space-time by sheer mass and gravity.

]]>http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/10/maybe-the-cosmos-has-a-sense-of-humor/feed/5The wingnut Wurlitzer fires up on Obama’s prayer breakfasthttp://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/09/the-wingnut-wurlitzer-fires-up-on-obamas-prayer-breakfast/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2015/02/09/the-wingnut-wurlitzer-fires-up-on-obamas-prayer-breakfast/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 18:11:46 +0000http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/?p=12816Predictably, the religious right is shocked — shocked I say! — at Obama’s recitation of the many sins committed by Christianity over the centuries. And it has nothing to do with politics! It just happens that one of the more recent sins, slavery, was egged on precisely by the very confederacy that now makes up an inordinate amount of right-wing opposition to progressive policies and is whining about this. Can someone please assume the martyr position?

Crooks and Liars — Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday declared that all slavery in the world had been eradicated thanks to the Christian faith.
At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, conservatives accused President Barack Obama of comparing Christianity to the Islamic terrorist group ISIS when he observed that many religions had been used to justify violence throughout history.

“So we’re responsible for the Crusades a thousand years ago?” Carlson complained. “Who’s ‘us’ anyway? And by the way, who ended slavery and Jim Crow? Christians. The Rev. Martin Luther King. Christians.” “Christianity is the reason we don’t have slavery in the world today,” he added. “I mean, talk about ahistorical.”

Yes, many abolitionists were motivated in part by their faith. Which is a perfectly fair point to make — and in fact that’s the whole point Obama was making. That there were and are powerful, moderate factions within Christianity, that one of these factions prevailed in the US over southern extremists and sympathizers — who went on to drag the entire nation into a bloody, horrible Civil War in their fruitless quest to preserve slavery, but that’s a story for another day. And that maybe, we can all hope, similar moderate factions will prevail in Islam, preferably with even less senseless slaughter and misery than the Inquisition and Crusades and the antebellum south and whatever else I’m missing. Although imo, hoping Islam will pull that off with even less bloodshed is quite a lot to hope for at this point. But I guess putting those comments in context would screw up a perfectly good chance to fan the flames of Obama hatred, and we can’t have that.

The fact is, slavery was an honorable trade in the ancient near east back when the Bible was written. There’s little in the Bible explicitly condoning slavery, but there’s plenty that seems to just assume it exists and nothing should be done about it beyond calling for a little humane treatment. The Old Testament sure sounds comfortable with the idea, and that fact didn’t escape the notice of some southern preachers back in the say who justified slavery right from the pulpit.